ABSTRACT
In the past suffering and death were familiar and close at hand. Relatives, friends, neighbors, and also children were brought in to the sickroom of a dying person (Ariés, 1974). People’s social representations of suffering and death-though, of course, formed by tradition and culture-included a large proportion of self-lived collective experiences. When the principles of hygiene were discovered, dirty homes and overcrowded bedrooms became a problem for doctors, and people’s social representations of illness and dying started to change. With the development of medical care in the West, illness, suffering, and death left the homes, to a large extent, and entered the hospitals.
